News Wrapup: 4/5/17

No Matter Studios are a three man team developing a Kickstarter project, which is now called ‘Praey for the Gods’, that is thought to be a spiritual successor to Shadow of the Colossus. After being originally titled ‘Prey for the Gods’, Bethesda/Zenimax felt that the title was too close to their game ‘Prey’ and opposed No Matter Studios’ trademark. Rather than have an expensive and time consuming lawsuit on their hands, No Matter decided to just concede and change the title of their game. Praey for the Gods is still in development and you can find out more about the game on their Kickstarter page.

Opinion: I hate to see a big publisher bullying smaller devs. Are we really at a point where we can’t use a single word that a big company has used before? This is such a scummy move by Bethesda/Zenimax. They should be spending more time fixing the embarrassingly bad input lag and bland gameplay in Prey instead of trying to hurt indie developers.

Steam changing their gifting system.

Steam is switching to a more direct way of gifting in place of their old system which involved emails or the Steam Inventory. Recipients of gifts will now have the game go straight into their game library rather than their inventory. Gift buyers are able to schedule exact dates to deliver gifts and if the recipient declines the gift they will get an automatic refund for their purchase.

Opinion: This is nice for convenience and these new features do sound like nice improvements but the inventory system had its perks too. Buying random cheap games to give out to people later during sales was a lot of fun but now it sounds like you immediately need to decide who’s getting the gift. I can understand this, though, as it helps counteract trading of keys bought from re-sellers.